EXCERPT: “For a project whose backers hail it as a major scientific feat, HAARP has remained extremely low-profile-almost unknown to most Alaskans, and the rest of the country. HAARP surfaced publicly in Alaska in the spring of 1993, when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began advising commercial pilots on how to avoid the large amount of intentional (and some unintentional) electromagnetic radiation that HAARP would generate. Despite protests of FAA engineers and Alaska bush pilots, the final Environmental Impact Statement gave HAARP the green light.

While a November 1993 “HAARP Fact Sheet” released to the public by the Office of Naval Research stressed only the civilian and scientific aspects of the project, an earlier, 1990, Air Force-Navy document, acquired by Earth Island Journal, listed only military experiments for the HAARP project. Scientists, environmentalists, and native people are concerned that HAARP’s electronic transmitters could harm people, endanger wildlife, and trigger unforeseen environmental impacts. Inupiat tribal advisor Charles Etok Edwardsen, Jr., wrote President Clinton on behalf of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope and the Kasigluk Elders Conference expressing their concern with the prospect of altering the earth’s neutral atmospheric properties.

HAARP also may violate the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention (ratified by the U.S. in 1979), which bans “military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects.” HAARP project manager John Heckscher, a scientist at the Air Force’s Phillips Laboratory, has called concerns about the transmitter’s impact unfounded. “It’s not unreasonable to expect that something three times more powerful than anything that’s previously been built might have unforeseen effects,” Heckscher told Microwave News. “But that’s why we do environmental impact statements.” [emphasis added]

EXCERPT: “How bad has the drought gotten in Los Angeles? Bad enough that the L.A. County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a $800,000 cloud seeding proposal last week to elicit more rainfall for the drought-stricken Southland, reports the Pasadena Star-News‘ Jennifer McLain. This unorthodox practice has already been used several times over the last 5 decades to varying degrees of success (emphasis on “varying” here).”

EXCERPTS: “To prevent rain over the roofless 91,000-seat Olympic stadium that Beijing natives have nicknamed the Bird’s Nest, the city’s branch of the national Weather Modification Office–itself a department of the larger China Meteorological Administration–has prepared a three-stage program for the 2008 Olympics this August.”

“First, Beijing’s Weather Modification Office will track the region’s weather via satellites, planes, radar, and an IBM p575 supercomputer, purchased from Big Blue last year, that executes 9.8 trillion floating point operations per second. It models an area of 44,000 square kilometers (17,000 square miles) accurately enough to generate hourly forecasts for each kilometer.Then, using their two aircraft and an array of twenty artillery and rocket-launch sites around Beijing, the city’s weather engineers will shoot and spray silver iodide and dry ice into incoming clouds that are still far enough away that their rain can be flushed out before they reach the stadium.Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over. Zhang Qian, head of Beijing’s Weather Modification Office, explains, “We use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their average size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall, and precipitation can be reduced.” August is part of Northeast Asia’s rainy season; chances of precipitation over Beijing on any day that month will approach 50 percent. Still, while tests with clouds bearing heavy rain loads haven’t always been successful, Qian claims that “the results with light rain have been satisfactory.”….

“The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country’s north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People’s Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain–an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China’s second largest, four times over. Furthermore, while Qian’s weather engineers in Beijing have been testing their capabilities for the past two years, the Chinese say that during the past five years, similar efforts have already helped produce good weather at national events like the World Expo in Yunnan, the Asian Games in Shanghai, and the Giant Panda Festival in Sichuan.”

“Although they possess the world’s largest weather modification program, the Chinese point to the Russians as being the most advanced. In 1986,Russian scientists deployed cloud-seeding measures to prevent radioactive rain from Chernobyl from reaching Moscow, and in 2000 they cleared clouds before an anniversary ceremony commemorating the end of World War II; China’s then president, Jiang Zemin, witnessed the results firsthand and pushed to adopt the same approach back home. As for the historical credit for starting the whole weather-engineering ball rolling back in 1946, that belongs to employees of General Electric in Schenectady, NY–most notably, scientist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of the late novelist Kurt), who worked out silver iodide’s potential to provide crystals around which cloud moisture would condense. During the 1960s and ’70s, the United States invested millions of federal dollars in experiments like Stormfury (aimed at hurricane control), Skywater (aimed at snow- and rainfall increase), and Skyfire (aimed at lightning suppression). Simultaneously, the U.S. military tried to use weather modification as a weapon in Project Popeye, during the Vietnam War, by rain-making over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in an effort to close it.”